An Observation on the Interference and Diffraction of Light

Hieu Nguyen
trihieu.231@gmail.com

May 19, 2016

1 Introduction
Interference of light is the emergence of fringes in which light is either constructively or destructively
combined. The condition for interference is to have more than one source of light that are coherent,
meaning all sources of light have the same frequency.
A single slit was used to spread the laser beam into two other slits which act as two coherent light
sources. The interference fringes were capture by a screen put far away from the two slits; dark and
bright fringes can be observed (Figure 2).
Diffraction can also create fringes independently from interference. In the double slit experiment, the
diffraction fringes are the large fringes that envelope many smaller fringes that caused by interference.
In figure 2, three diffraction fringes can be noticed including the largest fringe in the middle and the two
much smaller fringes on the left and the right of the middle fringe.
An equation describing the position of fringes is shown below:

d sin = n (1)

d : the distance between two slits

: the angle between the center axis to the nth fringe
n : the order number of fringe
: the wavelength of the laser source
sin effectively equals to tan at small angle of less than 10 and equals to yn /L, in which yn is
the distance between the nth fringe and the center fringe and L is the distance between the screen and
the two slits.

2 Materials and Methods

Materials for this experiment is from the EX-5545 kit from Pasco.com.
Included

Basic Optics Track, 1.2 m

High Precision Diffraction Slits
Basic Optics Diode Laser
Aperture Bracket
Linear Translator
High Sensitivity Light Sensor
Rotary Motion Sensor
Not included, but required

850 Universal Interface

PASCO Capstone
Procedure:

1
Interference and Diffraction - Lab 8 May 19, 2016 Page 2

1. Set up the following equipment on the optic track in order: Laser, single slit, double slit, and light
sensor. The light sensor is put on the rotary motion sensor.
2. Turn on the laser. Turn off the room light and set the position of the rotary sensor to the left of
the fringes.

3. Start rotate the sensor to the right slowly and observe the live data taken on a screen.
4. Record the intensity data versus the rotating angle.

3 Results and Discussion

From the data captured by the light sensor and the rotary motion sensor, we plot a graph of the light
intensity versus the angle (Figure 1).

Figure 1: A plot of the intensity versus the angle of the brightest diffraction fringe. Inside this fringe are
many smaller interference fringes.

It is shown in the plot that the middle diffraction fringe is most recognisable and contains many
smaller interference fringes.

4 Conclusion
We have obtained a plot of the light intensity versus the angle of the rotary sensor. From our plot, both
the diffraction fringes and the interference fringes are observed.

5 Acknowledgement
We thank Louisiana Tech University for providing the lab equipment and Dr. Neven Simicevic for giving
us authorization to conduct the experiment.

References
[1] E. Hecht, Optics, 5th ed. Pearson Education, 2015.
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6 Appendixes

Figure 2: A plot of the intensity versus the angle captured by a software. Both the diffraction fringes
and the interference fringes can be seen; there are 3 seen diffraction fringes and many interference fringes
inside each diffraction fringes.